Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds & VR

Friday, February 02, 2018

Who is Publishing Fake Ads for Second Life Pregnancy Roleplay and Why?

Longtime SLer Patchouli Woollahra was browsing Tumblr recently when this ad came scrolling across his screen:

Pregnancy roleplay in Second Life is a fairly popular subculture/activity, but also a very divisive one -- many think it's strange, and it's attracted quite a bit of "WTF?!" mockery among gamers on YouTube and other online forums. So it seemed odd that Linden Lab would evidently feature it as a key feature of Second Life.

Linden Lab, however, says they're not:

"These are not ads created by Linden Lab," company media rep Sheri Bryant told me, when I showed her the screen capture. "Someone else is apparently running them."

So if you see such an ad, I'd recommend not clicking it, because it's a potential security risk. And if it's not from Linden Lab, who is paying money to put them up, and why?

"[O[n Firefox the ad redirects directly to http://id.secondlife.com ... but on Google Chrome, it goes straight to the normal http://secondlife.com page. Attempting to surf directly to the base http://secondlife.com webpage forces a redirect to the login page on Firefox Quantum. It loads normally on Mozilla Chrome. There are possibilities that come to mind:

"1. The ad is running some malicious javascript on the fly to capture user input on the login in order to hijack SL accounts. This suggests that Linden Lab may need to alert Google to suspend any ads for http://secondlife.com they did not commission or pay for, as well as figure out who did this and why exactly.

"2. Someone has messed up configuring how http://secondlife.com handles Firefox Quantum. Hopefully it is this issue that is what is happening exactly. Basic analysis of the ad link URL by cutting and pasting into a plaintext editor reveals no attempts to hide anything in the URL beyond the usual mash of HTML entity codes."

There's a more benign explanation: Someone is a really big fan of pregnancy roleplay, and they're paying to promote it. For now, the mystery remains mysterious.